Actually, I wanted fancy menus with an H‑OVER effect. Exactly. But after I crawled into the topic, I decided against it. Following Adenauer’s aphorism, What do I care about my gossip of yesterday! I banned my idea to enable hover menus for bootScore by external tools. Because the viewpoint of Bootstrap and bootScore is really reasonable.
Solution:
Abandon HOVER! Use clean (nested) menus as they are offered by Bootstrap / bootScore!
Background:
Of course, I had reasons to change my mind.
First, the philosophy of Bootstrap has convinced me, no matter what else is common: Something should really only happen on the screen if I trigger it — with a click. Not when I just ‘slide’ somewhere. And if small and large devices get the same handling, that’s a gain, not a shortcoming.
Second, I did take a closer look at the alternatives:
Originally, I wanted to add Superfish to bootScore. Stupid is only that no one has published an update since 2017: There are 25 Issues open in the Superfish GitHub repository since 2013, and the analyses on Code-Frequency and Contributors show that there have been no further commits since 2017. I owe a lot to Superfish. It worked well in the previous version of my site. I am thankful for being able to use it. But to build my upgrade on it as well, it would have to be maintained permanently — as promised.
So what doing instead?
A code snippet or even a plugin that provides bootScore with a HOVER menu does not exist as of today1. What does exist are ideas and add-ons for Bootstrap itself — hosted on GitHub or on the net. The big wheel in terms of ‘sprucing up’ Bootstrap is turned by MDBootstrap. But its answer to the question of what “MDBootstrap” is, clarifies the problem that comes along with all these extensions: MDBootstrap “[…] is a library that greatly extends the capabilities of regular Bootstrap”.[]efn_note]cf. mdb-foundations))
This implies that — if we wanted to integrate such a modification into bootScore — we would have to strongly intervene in the mechanics of bootScore. We would have to do more than only adjusting something here and there in the templates of the bootScore theme. Eventually, we would have ended up with a standalone version based on mdbootstrap rather than bootScore. It may be that this is a worthwhile project. Maybe later, but not now. Now I prefer to use the upcoming improvements of bootScore — with as less effort as possible.
So after a restless night: If you ride a dead horse, get off. Forget about hover in bootScore. Enjoy the excellent ‘groundwork’ that the bootScore team has done for you.
And how does this … Menu
… support our migration to bootScore? Well, once a web designer has taken the first general steps and has checked SEO, she will soon turn to a really thick board, her properly clustered and presented menu without getting too fancy. Eventually, she is going to spruce and speed up the display of fixed and scalable images. This post talks about a part of this way.
- 2023-02-16 [↩]